


Sonatina in Choice

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: Partial Harmonics [4]
Category: The Losers (2010)
Genre: Multi, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-08
Updated: 2010-06-08
Packaged: 2017-10-10 00:21:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/93195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some things need time to finish settling out, in the aftermath.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sonatina in Choice

**Theme**   
    
Pooch holds off insanity by way of a smartphone Jensen's hacked into the network for him - no charge, no trace. It's full of photographs and emails, texts and audio-files, all of Jolene and Adrian. Everything he can keep, everything he can get and cling to. Including (especially) a three-am (for Jolene) email with a picture of Adrian screaming his head off with the subject-line _I'm selling your son to the circus and running away to be a showgirl in Las Vegas. _

He'd answered back, _You've still got the legs for it._ Because he could.

The Rockies make a good place to regroup;  the house - an hour or two out of the nearest small town - it's far from the worst place they've stayed in, and in some ways it's kind of a blessing it's small. Not enough space means that everyone can sort of agree to pretend that the reason Cougar and (as a result) Jensen are sleeping outside in a tent is that it's as comfortable as crashing on the floor and less likely to get anyone stepped on.

As opposed to Cougar having trouble with relaxing inside again, unless there's at least three ways out that he can see at all times.

They're out on the food run, Clay's inside with maps, lists and all the other clutter that comes with figuring out what to do next. Aisha's sitting out on the porch with a kerosene lantern and printouts that Pooch thinks are financial. He hasn't asked, and doesn't, even when he comes out to sit on the steps and pull out his phone.

He worries, constantly, that Max won't be dead by the time Adrian's old enough to realize he's missing a father. It's one thing for Pooch's heart to constantly ache for the baby he's not holding, for the home he's not in. He's lived through worse. It's even one thing for him not to be there to help, to do his part with 4AM feedings and diaper changes and trying to figure out what's wrong _this_ time: Jolene knows he'd rather be there with her than anywhere else, and she's good at making webs around her, ones that mean she's got support when she needs it.

It's something completely fucking different for Adrian's life to have that hole in it. That's not okay. And the tenuous connection of cell-towers, photo and video can only do so much.

Jolene talks to everyone else, too, when she can. Like if she can track him through four other people, he's less likely to get killed again either as cover or for real. That's how she knew he got shot, because he was actually going to leave that little detail out. But apparently there are rules about women and being friends, and so even though he doesn't tell Jolene about the gun-shot hole in his leg (or the broken arm, or the broken ribs, which were really the part that hurt the most), Aisha does.

He keeps Jolene's text from that - _JESUS H CHRIST LINWOOD PORTEOUS STOP GETTING SHOT IN YOUR GODDAMN LEG_ \- because whether it should or not, it makes him grin every time he looks at it. Even if it is the result of something he's not sure is a good idea, because his wife being friends with their potential little time-bomb isn't something that exactly thrills him. It doesn't. He's just not stupid enough to say anything to Jolene about it, just accepts that she will do whatever the hell she wants, and if she wants to be friends with Aisha al-Fadhil, she'll be friends with Aisha al-Fadhil and damn his worrying. He's used to it. It's part of why he loves her.

And there's the upsides, including the ones you really don't expect. Because it means that when Jolene emails him with a post-script that says, _BTW, has Aisha told any of _you_ yet that she decided not to kill Clay?_ he only stares at it for about five or ten seconds, and then puts his head in his hands, instead of trying to figure out if somehow that was a code for something.

He thinks about sending back, asking Jolene what exactly she's talking about, what exactly Aisha said - for clarification, details, whatever - but he doesn't. Because Jolene means exactly what she said, or she wouldn't've sent it, and she sent it because she wants him to pay attention, wants him to know. Because it wasn't like she decided to make friends blind; it wasn't like Pooch didn't tell her everything, _everything_, as soon as they were out of the hospital, Adrian in arms. Word-for-word from memory, when he could.

She knows. She sent him this on purpose.

Behind him, Aisha makes a noise that he thinks is disgust and there's the sound of papers folding; he looks over at her, and she's putting the printouts aside and starts taking her Beretta apart to clean it. She's as bad as Cougar with that, turns it into a displacement activity: you can tell more about what's up with Cougar and Aisha by how they're cleaning their guns and how often than anything else.

Pooch watches her for a minute, and figures: hell, why not? "I hear you cancelled a dance," he says, talking around it, holding up the phone so when she looks up - which she does, motion arrested halfway through taking the Beretta to pieces - she can see why he'd know to ask.

Her eyes focus on him for a minute, and then she goes back to her gun, and says, "Decided I didn't like the song," all deliberately casual.

"Yeah?" Pooch says, and he might actually believe her. "Wasn't my favourite either."

He gets up from the step, hauls around the other wooden chair and sits in it. "So what's next?" he asks.

"New song," she replies, pretending she's engrossed in what she's doing. "New dance."

"Really?" He has to ask it, has to look at her until she looks up again. She's got no problem with eye-contact, when she does. She could be lying, setting up a long game so their guard is down - but Pooch suspects she actually isn't.

"Yeah," she says. And the reason he suspects she's not lying is that there's a lot of exasperation in the word, but like it's all at herself. And Pooch finds he's smiling.

"Good," he says. When she gives him a look full of question, he adds, "Well, I mean, you are the most annoying backseat driver I've ever had - "

"Side-seat," she interrupts, looking back at the work she was doing. The corner of her mouth twitches just a little, like she's trying not to smile.

"What?"

"I'm not actually in the backseat when I'm criticizing your driving," Aisha tells him, calmly. "Or flying. I'm in the side-seat."

" . . . that would be exactly what I mean, yes, thank you for the demonstration," Pooch retorts; she grins. "_As I was saying_, you might be the most annoying backseat driver I've ever had," he continues, "but I think I can put up with it."

Aisha sits back, rests her head on her hand for a minute. "Good to know," she says, and it actually sounds like she might mean it. Then she flicks the cloth at the hand Pooch has his phone in. "Tell Jolene I say hi," she tells him, and the undertones are complicated, but probably good.

Pooch doesn't. He just sends back, _I love you more than anything. You know that._ And she must be right near, because it's only about thirty seconds before he gets a reply. _You better_, she says. Then, on a different line, _I love you too_.   
    
    
**Development and Recapitulation**   
    
Small quarters and downtime means that everyone finds ways to keep out of each other's hair, even if it's only for a couple weeks and the last edge of recovery. Clay picks up the habit of waking up first so he's eaten and settled in somewhere out of the way, and he usually beats everyone else by at least an hour - which is why he's a bit wary when he comes down this morning, and Aisha's already sitting at the table with two cups of coffee.

"It's not poisoned," she says, as he pauses at the bottom of the tiny, rickety staircase up to the small rooms above. He might think it was too early for this, but if nothing else, Aisha makes good coffee. Clay pulls the other chair out, turns it around and sits so he can rest his arms on the back.

"Poison's not your style anyway," he points out, picking up the mug. He gets a thin smile.

She's been drawn in and thoughtful since the second Bolivian disaster, since all three of them came back, miraculously alive, and her buddy Lev looked like he was going to faint in relief - looked, honestly, how Clay came close to feeling. There'd be pieces of Maclean mailed to the people he took his blood-money from when they were done, but contemplating revenge doesn't do much to get rid of the gnawing fear for Clay anymore.

Took him a while to notice, because frankly, she wasn't his first concern. When he did, he left her alone, not sure enough of how he read her to press anything. For all of how it turned out, it's hard to get the image of the night in the store to dissipate, the echo of Roque's _again because of a woman_ out of his head - there are some things about Aisha al-Fadil Clay's pretty damn sure about, but he's willing to admit by now that the details can get shaky.

And he killed her father, and that - well. He actually does get it, for all the good that does either of them. Enough to know just how much that breaks, no matter how much he deflects and laughs. So he didn't pretend to know what was going on with her, chose not to ask Jensen if he _did_, just left it alone. He's not sure he wants answers down this way, anyway.

Now, sitting at this table, he figures he's going to get them whether he want them or not.

"I'm going to ask you a question," Fadhil's daughter says, calmly, "and you're going to give me a straight answer."

Clay stalls with a swallow of coffee, takes in what he can of her. Aisha's good at showing you what she wants you to see; a lot of the time it's not even lies. Just careful selection of which truth she lets get to her skin. That means when she's not showing anything - like now - the difference tells its own story. "Okay," he says. "Shoot."

"Why did you kill my father?" she asks, leaning one arm on the table, watching his face with a sort of distant intent that makes every warning signal in his head go off, including some he doesn't even know what they're warning about yet. It's the kind of instinct that so often does fail him, with women, or at least with women like her, so when it's working he damn well listens and looks where the warning signs are pointing.

She's calm, for one, which she doesn't tend to be when this comes up. Calm and watching him carefully, like there's more in the tell-tales than in the answer. She also said _why_, which seems like an odd question on the surface - but isn't, if you think about it, because without knowing exactly what was there, it seems kind of redundant to shoot a man just as you're about to drop a bomb on his house. If you were going to shoot him, why waste the ordinance?

Which means that's not what she's getting at, which, Clay knows, makes this a test.

After a minute he takes another drink and says, "Got it from Cougar already, didn't you," because it wouldn't occur to Pooch or Jensen that it might matter, but there's enough that's the same between Alvarez and al-Fadhil that it might occur to _him_. 

Aisha actually looks . . . half-pleased at the words - but she doesn't answer. Clay puts down the mug.

"Because he wanted me to," he says, simply. "Which I think you already know. Might have had a chance of getting out of blast-range if he'd just gone, but he didn't. Couldn't figure out why at the time."

"Do you know now?" she asks, cool but not angry, not now, and Clay realizes this is some kind of end-game for her, whatever the game happens to be. A last step.

"Guy like Max cleans up his messes and then forgets about them," Clay replies. "And a guy like Max wouldn't think to check codicils in someone's will. Or that a daughter might be in on her father's mission." She still doesn't say anything, so Clay finishes, "Dying there meant the trail to you was cut. Max wouldn't go looking; his mess was cleaned up, he could move on. You wouldn't, and you'd have the money to do it."

He doesn't realize she's holding her breath until she takes one, and sits back, and he feels almost like he passed. She says, "If you'd tried to tell me this before I would have shot you."

"I know," Clay replies. "That's why I didn't."

"Our dance is cancelled," she tells him, blunt, and he's both taken aback and not surprised at all, and the second feeling wins as everything clicks into place. "As long," she adds, qualifying, "as you don't get anyone killed because you did something fucking stupid."

If that happened, she'd have to get in line, but he doesn't say that. He can't quite help pushing his luck, though, so he does ask, "And if it's not because of something fucking stupid?" and watches her try not to find it funny. And tries to ignore the part of him that knows there is now absolutely no chance, for him and her, even more than when she might take her revenge some day - the part of him that knows it, and regrets it.

He has been shot, and had his car blown up, and all kinds of other things, over women - although in fairness there've been plenty liaisons with a lot less excitement and no firefights to speak of - and he knows it. And when she was just the money, just the person hiring them to do a job, he had no reason not to take anything she'd offer, or hope to get more. When she was the money. When she was the client.

Team was different. All kinds of different.

"I get Jensen's glasses," she replies, "and Cougar's hat."

He catches himself thinking he'll miss her sense of humour, and then tells himself he's an idiot: it's not going anywhere, because she's not. What he'll miss, what he'll really miss, is being the only one who gets it. But jealousy in general is for people younger or stupider than him, or both; jealousy over this woman, that's just idiocy, and he knows it.

"Deal," he says, gravely, and raises his mug. She does the same.  Started over liquor, he thinks, sealed over coffee.

She gets up and goes for the pot on the stove, and Clay lets all of this sink in, move around, fill out what he knows about the world he's in. Lets his mind make all the connections that are there to make; and when he smiles this time, it's at his own expense and at hers.

"Have to say," he tells her, half-turning, "this is the first time I've lost a girl to Jensen."

The smile turns into a grin as she goes still, coffee-pot half raised to pour until she puts it down instead and turns around to give him a look that's half disbelieving, half glare. He meets it, and the grin only widens.

"You didn't claim anything of Pooch's," Clay counters, and when it takes her a second to muster an answer he knows he's right.

"That would be Jolene's," she says, like he's an idiot, and he just holds her gaze just long enough to tell her he knows that's bullshit before he gets up.

"Cougar, now," he goes on, like she didn't interrupt, "everyone loses girls to Cougar and I'm no exception. But to Jensen - that's a first."

He leaves plenty of space when he steps beside her to empty the last of his coffee down the sink and rinse the cup, put it in the rack. Her fingers drum just once or twice on the countertop, but there's a lengthy kind of silence before she says anything else. Before she turns around to face him, to lean on the counter, and say anything else.

"You've lost your mind," she tells him.

"Really," he says, and then, when the unwavering stare itches, turns to look at her - look down at her, because they're close enough for that.

She may be the most beautiful woman he's fallen for; she's definitely the most dangerous, and the one that was the worst idea for him, and he knows it. If he's lucky that he isn't going to pay for that with lives (his, or any others, far more important), well, that's luck. He'll only push that so far.

Her return shot is, "You never had the girl in the first place, Clay." And she's not kind enough to leave after she says it, either.

"I guess not," he says, lets the hit sink in. Gives up the game when he says,  "But it looks like I've got the last part of my team."

The smile is slow, and small, but it's there. She doesn't agree, not directly, because that's not her style either. She just pushes off the counter and Clay starts working out how not to watch her hips as she walks.

It's going to take some practice.

"Clay?" she says at the door, and when he looks up: "If _I_ think you're losing your head over the wrong woman? I'll just kill her."

He believes her, too.   
    
**Coda**   
    
Clay's right, and wrong, at once.

They're back out of the woods before she bothers to look at it close, leaving the Rockies for a New York hotel and heading for Paris to deal with Maclean. They travel separately, under different covers: Pooch and Clay to store weapons and gear somewhere safe, and get rid of what they can't store; Cougar and Jensen going ahead to sort of fake passports and tickets; and Aisha last, settling up with the guy they rented the cabin from and hitchhiking part of the way.

It's not about clearing her head, because there's nothing she wants to get rid of. It's just about shaking what she's got back into order, from Bolivia to really, finally giving up the claim on Clay's head. She thinks her mother might be proud of that. The thought actually makes it easier.

Clay's right, and he's wrong. Or maybe it's that he's not right _yet_, and that means he might not be right - not about this, not about her and the boys - at all. She hasn't gone there yet, and she might never.

Except that when she thinks about it, she's hit by the question of why _not_, and the question doesn't come with any kind of compelling answer. And the more she thinks about it, the more her imagination . . .

Sitting in a truck, the taciturn driver a woman built like a tank with a surprisingly pretty face, Aisha watches the scenery, and tries out possibilities in her head, thinking of good ends and bad, what she wants and what she doesn't. Sex itself is just an act, just a thing you do or you don't - that's not really what matters. What matters is testing the edges, what the difference is with the two boys she brought out of the forest with her. The boys, she admits, she's been half-avoiding since. And why. And what that means.

When she gets to New York, they have dinner at the hotel restaurant and pretend they're normal people. They keep the stories to ones that at least might sound like ordinary soldiers could pull off. Aisha watches Jensen's face and Cougar's hands, and thinks about where she is, and how she got here. About what hides under Jensen's veneer of the ridiculous, and under Cougar's pretense that he's not hiding.

Halfway through the (many) drinks they have after the plates are cleared away, she winds up meeting Cougar's eyes half by accident - and half not, idly wondering if he's noticed her watching. Aisha's not surprised when the look she gets says the answer is _yes_.

(If everyone loses girls to Cougar, it's probably because of the lot of them, he's the one who's got enough sense to let the girl come to _him_. The virtues of a calling that teaches you to stay still , shut up and _wait_.)

It's past eleven when she does knock on their door. Jensen answers it, of course, and because it's Jensen he just steps back out of the way _before_ he asks her what she wants. _Do you have any hobbies?_ she hears, in memory, and it makes her smile.

Because nobody should have it all their own way, she just pushes the door closed with her foot, puts a hand to the back of his neck to pull him down and kisses him with no more warning than that. He's been drinking rye since they left the restaurant; she can taste it, and he didn't have any down there. His glasses come askew, bumping against her face, but only a little.

The kiss does shut off his brain, but he actually recovers quickly; when she lets him go, he only looks a little bit like he's been poleaxed. "That . . . was unexpected," he says, slowly, but still has his hand on her waist where it fell, and certainly isn't objecting.

"Part of my charm," she says, an echo of the forest.

"It _absolutely_ is," he says, and the fervency is kind of cute; he might have said more but she cuts him off, calls over her shoulder further into the suite, in Spanish.

"I'm borrowing your boy," she tells Cougar, playing, sure he'll get it - and he does.

"The hell you are," he calls back, and for Jensen's benefit _he's_ speaking English. "If you're nice, I'll share."

And now Jensen's face tells her he's mostly lost higher brain-function, and she laughs. More because it's perfect than because it's funny.

_Where would you rather be_?


End file.
